A Postscript to Ticket Woes - CORRECTED

UPDATE: Correction in the 4th paragraph.

Last week, we went on a rant about our ticket purchasing experience.

A couple of followup points. First, that post was written in the heat of the moment when we were under the impression that the Washington Neil Young concert had sold out in less than 15 minutes. It turns out that due to a giant TicketMaster fuckup, tickets did not go onsale on schedule.

So we were pretty irked about schlepping down to the box office, hanging out for it to open, realizing that tickets weren't being sold at the venue, and then racing to connect online only to see no tickets available.

The tirade was *not* directed at Neil. We were mainly lashing out at the horrid, horrid TicketMaster/Live Nation Corporations oligopoly merger which will only make matters worse for ordinary people fans in favor of the wealthy elite.

So apologies on the tone thing.

Second, we'd like to address this whole weird intersection of art and commerce whenever Neil does something like go on tour, release an album, make a box set, etc.

Oddly, there are some that seem to have a very serious issue on the subject of putting a price on one's talent and product. Like they have insider knowledge of all the costs and factors that go into these decisions but yet never seem to state what those factors are? We can't really explain at all what Neil and Elliot strategize on the subject of profits and have no idea how that all works.

We've all read Shakey and the quotes by Neil on business. But there was one thing that L.A. Johnson said once (which we're trying to locate) where L.A. observed that in all the years he had spent working with Neil he never heard him once make a creative decision based on a profit factor.

So, this is a long way around towards dealing with something that kinda irked us the other day. It was this comment by Paul on the nature of Thrasher's Wheat:

"Seems like this site spends a lot of time hyping the great and legendary creative artist Neil Young with a commercialization-like emphasis."

We requested some elaboration but got none and so we're not going to really sweat it.

But we'll just say this.

We receive a surprising number of unsolicited ad placements over the years, all of which we reject based on a number of factors. Mainly, they're just annoying trash ads that we don't think any reader cares about.

Having said that, we want to share the most recent ad placement rejection we had. It was from a ticket broker who wanted to place an ad on TW for Neil Young seats. We get this all the time and reject them.

But this time -- out of curiosity -- we wanted to see where it went. In a followup on specifics, the broker claims to have front row center seats for all upcoming Neil Young concerts. As part of the agreement, we would receive a substantial fee for a 30 day ad, as well as, a percentage of each completed ticket sale. Based on the brokers "conservative estimate" of $500 per seat, a percentage commission, and an assumed click thru rate, we were talking about the potential to earn multiples times more in a month than we have in the years of running banner ads and Amazon commissions.

But we said no thanks.

Watch out for the greedy hand Paul.

Watch out.